I don’t know a darn thing about VoodooPad (although looking at its features, its sounds kind of neat.) But its developer, Gus Mueller, has written a long postmortem post on his blog about developing the 2.0 version: lessons he learned, stuff he threw out while developing it, good and bad choices he made along the way.
I really enjoy reading this sort of stuff. I’m no kind of advanced developer (well, not much of a developer at all, actually), but I always learn interesting things from these kind of software programmer journals. I love them.
(I got it from Brent Simmons. Brent is the developer of NetNewsWire and MarsEdit and writes a lot of these sort of developer introspection posts himself. Also: NetNewsWire and MarsEdit rock.)
Here’s a cool trick with Firefox I discovered a few weeks back that has apparently been around for a zillion years and I just didn’t know about it. Maybe you didn’t either. It works with Mozilla, too.
Bookmarks now come with a keywords field. You can use this field to assign shortcuts to the bookmarks you use most often, and then use that shortcut in the location bar. According to the Mozilla web site, these are called custom keywords, but I think of them more like shortcuts.
For example, I spend of a lot of time on the web site for the Los Gatos Public Library, which has the annoying URL of http://library.town.los-gatos.ca.us/. History completion will help me out if I just start typing “library” in the location bar, assuming I’ve already been to the library before in that session. Or, I can assign a shortcut to the bookmark for that URL — say, “lgl”.
Use Manage Bookmarks>Properties to examine a URL. You’ll note the name and URL of the bookmark, as usual. Then there’s a keyword field. That’s where I put the lgl part for the shortcut. I can put more than one shortcut in here: lgl, l, library, whatever. All of them count.
Now I can just type lgl into the location bar, and Firefox will expand that into the full URL and go there. Keep in mind that you can use Control-L to open the the location bar (Command-L on the mac), so you don’t have to even use the mouse. Control-L lgl return, done.
But wait, there’s more. You can use shortcuts for searches and then stick the keywords you want to search for on the location bar, too. Hey, you say, I can search in the search box up there in the righthand corner. I don’t know about you, but I think that search box is kinda small. To get there I have to actually click on it. And if I want to search different places I have to pull down the menu and tell Firefox where I want to search. The search box is there but its kind of a pain to use. But hey, you say, if I put search keywords on the location box right now, Firefox will search google. Well, yeah, but all you’ll get is the “I feel lucky” response. I almost never get lucky. (ahem). BUT WAIT, you say, I have googlebar. Yes, but this works for sites other than google. This works for any site that has a search. Shortcuts for searches: much cooler.
Any other protests? No? OK. Here’s how it works: If the site you’re going to search encodes the keywords in the URL, you create a bookmark for that URL but you replace the keywords with %s. So for example if you search google for “foo” the URL looks like this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=foo
So the URL you actually bookmark will look like this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
To create the shortcut for this, use Manage Bookmarks>New Bookmark. Call it something like Google Search (this is different from your normal Google bookmark, if you have one) and put in that special search URL. Give it the keyword of your choice (I like “g”). OK.
Now you can type g firbnotz in the location bar and Firefox will tell google to search for the word firbnotz. (“No pages were found containing the word ‘firbnotz’”, darn)
Here’s an enormous list of search engines and other searchable sites with their URLs already encoded for shortcuts for you so you don’t have to figure things out. You can crib from this site to create shortcuts for the stuff you use most often.
Enjoy!
Yahoo! News – IBM Puts PC Unit Up for Sale – NY Times
I bought an IBM Thinkpad laptop almost ten years ago after a really great conversation with an IBM sales rep at comdex, and I’ve owned three more since then. I bought a a refurbished X31 with a full IBM warranty just recently as my main Windows machine, replacing both an older X20 Eric stole from me and an aging desktop. When I was having horrible trouble with my hands in 1999 and I could not type on any computer keyboard, ergonomic or not, for more than about half an hour a day, I discovered that I actually could type on a thinkpad keyboard. IBM hardware saved my career.
Eric inherited my old Thinkpad X20 because he discovered there was a thriving community of linux developers and support forums for the Thinkpad. Red Hat installed on it without problems. When the screen died a few months back he replaced it with a slightly larger model (a T40) because he found out that IBM itself was certifying and supporting linux on those models. No one else seems to have such large corporate support for linux (who would ever have guessed that IBM would be at the vanguard of free software development? It still boggles the mind).
I’m primarily a Mac user, but I do use Windows a lot for work. And the thinkpad hardware, while not as technolusty gorgeous as a powerbook or even, say, a Sony Vaio, is incredibly well-constructed. I’ve only ever had one problem with a thinkpad — my first one, a 770, blew up, literally, small puff of smoke, smell of ozone — and when I called them they had the entire thing fixed in two days, including shipping (I still don’t know how they did that). And for the record I have no difficulties with the nipple mouse and actually prefer it to a trackpad.
So although I understand IBM’s motivation — the PC business is obviously not a good business to be in unless you are Dell — I will mourn the thinkpads when they are gone.
So by now everyone knows about the new iPod photo that’s been announced with the color screen that you can use to view photographs. Goody.
But you sync photographs onto the iPod using…iTunes. Buh? Pardon? Apple *has* a tool for dealing with photos: iPhoto. Now, OK, iPhoto is not the best product. I use it and I am not happy with it. Its easy to use for really basic importing and building slideshows but really cumbersome for anything more complex. It bogs down if you put any large number of photos into it. Its organization of the photos on the filesystem is labyrinthine and nasty. And it doesn’t provide an easy way of searching or sorting photos on metatdata the way that iTunes has (smart playlists: godlike). I have cursed iPhoto over and over and over again, wishing it were remotely as good a program as iTunes. (and before you all sent me mail, yes I am looking at flickr).
With the photopod this was Apple’s chance to revamp iPhoto, to make it the photo organization program everyone wants to use the same way they did with iTunes. They could have built syncing with the iPod into iPhoto and driven iPod users to using iPhoto. Add a web-based photo organizer like flickr or better integration one of the net photo printing services and Apple could have really had a chance to grab the photo market the same way they did the music market.
They didn’t do any of that. Sync your photos with iTunes? That doesn’t make any sense.
But I’ve been wrong before about ipod stuff, so we’ll see.
And while I’m here, the black iPod would be kind of neat if it weren’t for all that U2 stuff.
The Fool’s Errand is one of the most addictive obsessive compulsive puzzle games I have ever played. I spent forever without sleep when I was in college in the 80’s playing it. My grades suffered. My relationships suffered. I was a wreck. It was evil.
Cliff Johnson, the author, wrote a few other games that had a similar feel in the early 90’s, and they also had a tendency to force me to abandon my entire life until I had solved them.
I discovered a year or so ago that Johnson had updated the game so that it ran on modern Macintoshes (and on Windows now), and off I went again. This time around it took me a lot less time solve it because I remembered a lot of the puzzles, but still: complete immersion. Something about this kind of game sucks onto my brain and just won’t let go. It is a sickness.
So yesterday I found out that Cliff Johnson has been working on a sequel to Fool’s Errand, called the Fool and His Money. He’s taking pre-orders. I don’t think I’ve clicked on a paypal button so fast in my life (Pay! Pay! Pay! Yes! Yes!).
I get my copy next month. Must budget time off from work.